In attempt to quell the controversy surrounding the TPP, the administration is recycling the same lofty promises that were used to push for passage of CAFTA: the deal would safeguard public health, spur economic prosperity at home and abroad, and protect workers, consumers, and the environment.

After 10 years of CAFTA, the emptiness of such promises is on full display. Today in Central America, life-saving medicines are more expensive due to monopoly protections that CAFTA gave to pharmaceutical corporations – protections that are slated for expansion in the TPP. And the headlines from several CAFTA countries do not report economic prosperity, but economic instability, drug violence and forced migration. Meanwhile, CAFTA’s labor provisions have failed to halt the assassination of dozens of Central American union workers who were trying to end unmitigated labor abuses like wage theft. In contrast, the pact’s foreign investor privileges, which the TPP would expand, have succeeded in empowering multinational corporations to challenge domestic laws, including consumer and environmental protections.

Worse than repeating the mistakes of the past, the TPP would repeat the mistakes of CAFTA’s present.

Making life-saving medicines unaffordable

During the debate over CAFTA, health experts warned that by handing pharmaceutical firms greater monopoly protections, the deal would restrict Central Americans’ access to more affordable generic versions of life-saving drugs.

Unfortunately, they were right. Take, for example, Kaletra, a drug used to fight HIV/AIDS. Under CAFTA rules, Kaletra has enjoyed monopoly protections in Guatemala, making generic versions unavailable, for the entire first decade of CAFTA. Without a generic alternative, Guatemala’s public health system pays about $130 per bottle of Kaletra. In contrast, the generic version of Kaletra costs less than $20 per bottle, according to the Pan American Health Organization reference price. For Guatemala’s taxpayers, paying more than six times the generic price for Kaletra under CAFTA means less money to build schools or bridges. For Guatemala’s HIV/AIDS patients, it can mean the difference between life and death.

Like CAFTA, the TPP is slated to include extreme monopoly protections for pharmaceutical corporations. Indeed, the deal even omits limited provisions to protect access to affordable medicines that were included the most recent U.S. free trade agreements. That’s why Doctors without Borders has described the TPP as not only worse than CAFTA in restricting access to medicines, but “the most damaging trade agreement ever for global health.”

Corporations have not held back in using this controversial parallel legal system to challenge pro-consumer policies, including government efforts to keep electricity affordable. In 2010 a U.S. energy company with an indirect, minority stake in Guatemala’s electric utility used ISDS to challenge Guatemala’s decision to lower electricity rates for consumers. The next day, the company sold off its minority share. A three-person ISDS tribunal generously decided to treat the firm as a protected “investor” in Guatemala and ordered the government to pay the corporation more than $32 million. In another energy-related CAFTA case, a U.S. financial firm challenged the Dominican Republic’s decision not to raise electricity rates amid a nationwide energy crisis. The government decided to pay the firm to drop the case in a $26.5 million settlement, reasoning that it was cheaper than continuing to pay legal fees.

CAFTA countries also face an increasing array of ISDS cases against environmental protections. A U.S. mining company, for example, has launched a claim against the Dominican Republic for delaying and then denying environmental approval for an aggregate materials mine that the government deemed a threat to nearby water sources. Other U.S. investors in the Dominican Republic have threatened to launch a CAFTA claim against the government for denying environmental approval for their plans to expand a gated resort.

Worse still, CAFTA has contributed to the region’s economic instability. Before the razor-thin passage of CAFTA, development organizations warned that the deal could lead to the displacement of the family farmers that constitute a significant portion of Central America’s workforce, by forcing them to directly compete with highly-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. Indeed, agricultural imports from the United States in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala have doubled since the deal went into effect, while the countries’ agricultural trade balance with the United States has dropped, spelling farmer displacement.

And despite promises that CAFTA would make up for rural job loss by creating new jobs in apparel factories, apparel exports to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala have actually fallen $1.6 billion, or 21 percent, since the year before CAFTA took effect. Not only has the promise of new factories disappeared – so have existing factories.

If the TPP were to take effect, the apparel jobs of Central America would be expected to decline even quicker, contributing to further economic instability. That’s because the TPP includes Vietnam, a major apparel exporter where independent unions are banned and where the minimum wage averages less than 60 cents an hour – a fraction of the minimum wages in Central America (or even in China). Central America is already losing the race to the bottom. It will only fall further behind if the TPP makes Vietnam the newest low-wage competitor.

The promise-defying track record of CAFTA need not be repeated. When the TPP negotiators meeting today in a resort hotel in Hawaii finish this round of negotiations, we are likely to hear a familiar litany of promises about how the TPP would benefit consumers, workers, and the environment. With those promises punctured by a decade of CAFTA’s stark realities, we have a unique opportunity to say “enough is enough.”

Comments

As the thought and political motive to forge a "New World Order", One World government, this whole idea to open and change the Constitution becomes a threat to Civil Rights and protection of freedom that is granted to Americans citizens in the Current US Constitution.

The Current document existed in its entirety when America was known as the Greatest Nation in the history of the planet Earth.

The Constitution does not need changing, just the way US government works together and follows the instructions written in the guidelines of the Constitution as to how government is to properly function is the problem.

Follow the law as it is written.

A Communist government official will cause havoc and decieve public opinion to believe that government no longer is effective in a Capitalist society to get citizens to want to make changes, to move the political system into the direction of Socialism so that the political system can be set up for a later Communist takeover.

Get the Communist sympathisers out of your political system whatever way possible.

1954, President Eisenhower passed an Anti Communists act by an Executive order. 1940 Smith Act was established to prevent government takeover by foreign governments. These laws still exist on the books and It is time to put these laws into practice.

God gave man the oppertunity to choose to rule himself under the laws established by God or the laws and rules established by man.

Only those who study, practice or even choose to recognise God will want to seek to act in the ways for God's approval and blessings.

Those so intelligent who can produce artificial intelligence, Clone their own animals and humans, extend human life expectancy that defy God's will for his chosen time of death, that which counters natures own population control plan.

God and religion stands in the way of those who choose to be ruled over by the New World Order Laws being established by men of Science, Engineering and Technology rather than by the old traditional religious rules of God.

Gods traditional laws and rules stand in the way to advance a region such that of the middle east whom are a strong ruled religious region of the world.

For this new world order to suceed in all regions of the world, all nations will be required to give up their old traditional religious teachings and be converted to a new religion that accepts modern man rule, under the new established Laws of man created under Science, Engineering and Technology.

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